Category Archives: Current Events

Current Events, Native Americans, Red Lives Matter

#MMIW

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I posted about the Senate Indian Affairs Committee meeting on human trafficking in Indian Country last week.  The upshot of the hearings was disappointing.  All acknowledge a problem exists but there is little data on its scope.  At the hearings, the Justice Department seemed uninterested to committing the resources necessary to gather that data.  Anyone who studies Native American history closely will note, however, that the Justice Department has never prioritized crime committed in Indian Country. Though the Obama Administration’s revision of the Violence Against Women Act was significant, the reform went only so far.  Fortunately, more attention is being drawn to this problem.

Some important work is being done and some media are beginning to take notice.   The National Collaborating Center for Aboriginal Health in Canada has published a report, Indigenous Communities and Family Violence: Changing the Conversation, that presents domestic violence in Indian reserves as one more of the bitter fruits of an enduring colonialism.   They offer a powerful list of recommendations calling upon provincial and national officials to recognize indigenous perspectives, the continuing process of colonialism and dispossession, and the many values that inhere in native cultures to remedy the problem of violence on Indian reserves. It is a powerful report, and worth reading.

To get a sense of the problems that occur, both from within indigenous families and from the outside, it is worth looking at the recent report from Red Power Media. While Americans are reeling from yet another explosion of gun violence, and the disaster that has struck Puerto Rico made worse by the nation’s disaster of a president, an indigenous community in British Columbia is worried.   In response to the growth of “man camps,” so-called,  a British Columbia indigenous community tribe is  stocking up on rape kits in anticipation of the expected wholesale assault on Native American women.

“Nak’azdli Whut’en First Nation is nestled on the banks of Stuart Lake in north-central British Columbia, surrounded by rolling foothills and tall trees.

It is a relatively remote community, breathtaking in scenery and dependent on economic opportunities in forestry, mining, and pipeline development. It is a community bracing for major change.

Over the next decade, as many as 6,000 new energy industry workers could descend upon the region. The prospect of such a big influx of workers living in nearby “man camps” has aroused fears of increased violence and drug use.

The influx could more than double the population of about 4,500 in the Fort St. James area, which includes the municipality, rural communities and First Nations. Nak’azdli has just 1,972 members living both on and off reserves. The nearest city, Prince George, is 160 kilometres away.”

The threat is significant.  The Lake Babine First Nation and the Nak’azdli Whut’en commissioned a study, funded by the British Columbia provincial government.  The evidence they found demonstrated

that industrial camps are associated with increased rates of sexual assault and violence against Indigenous women, along with addiction, sexually transmitted infections, and family violence.

“The potential for sexual assault, violence, disappearances, (sexually transmitted diseases), increases with the number of trucks on the road,” study author Ginger Gibson told National Observer. “There’s a whole whack of issues that don’t get considered until construction is happening and that’s too late.”

Meanwhile, in North Dakota, after the murder of pregnant Savanna La Fontaine Greywind, (that’s her in the picture to the right) her family hired attorney Gloria Allred to represent them in a search for answers.  LaFontaine-Greywind’s murder–her body was found in the Red River, her newborn baby in the hands of one of the suspects-along with the hiring of Allred created enough pressure at last to get officials in North Dakota to expand their investigation.  North Dakota’s state senate has finally decided to look into the “epidemic” of missing and murdered indigenous women.

Under pressure, the Justice Department has announced grants programs to investigate the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women, as well as violence against women and children in Indian Country.  $130 million has been directed to addressing these challenges.  According to Assistant Attorney General Rachel Brand, “these awards stand as a clear expression of our support for Native American women and tribal self-determination and reflect the vital role we believe American Indian tribes and Alaska Native villages play in ensuring the safety of all our citizens.”

Another way to get at the scope of this enormous problem, is to follow it on social media, using the hashtags #IdleNoMore and #MMIW.  A Facebook page exists to help in locating and, in some instances, identifying missing and murdered indigenous women.   If you know of additional resources, please forward them to me and I will be sure to distribute them as widely as I can.

Current Events

The Second Amendment is A Big Part of the Problem

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The act of terrorism that occurred last night in Las Vegas has caused me to revisit an opinion piece I wrote for a local newspaper several years ago, in the wake of the shooting at New Town.  The original piece is behind a paywall, but I have copied here the manuscript.  The urgency grows, as does my sense that nothing will be done.

******************************************************************************

 

 

Thirty thousand Americans die every year from gunshot wounds, whether from homicide, suicide or accident.  The National Rifle Association has thus far opposed any attempt to remedy this problem. They remind Americans that the Founding Fathers saw fit to assert in the Second Amendment to the Constitution that “a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Those willing to excuse the wreckage guns have wrought have consistently triumphed.  No matter what arguments the advocates of gun control deploy– that the phrase “well regulated” implies some ability on the part of government to limit gun rights; that the verb construction to “bear arms” has been used almost always to describe a military use for weapons; that the Constitution is a “living” document that ought to be interpreted in the light of changing circumstances; and that the Founding Fathers could never have considered that the sort of violence acted out in Newtown and in the streets of Chicago a justifiable example of  bearing arms–the advocates of “gun rights” will always have their tendentious reading of the Second Amendment to defend their position.

So let’s repeal the Second Amendment.  It is dated, lethal, and morally abhorrent. Americans have repealed amendments before. The Constitution is not a sacred text. It is a framework for government, the product of dozens of compromises. The men who framed the document envisioned that it would be changed.  They made the process difficult and time-consuming, but it has happened.

The NRA advocates an untrammeled right to keep and bear arms and asserts the constitutional right to do so.  Meanwhile the killings continue.  Let’s take aim at that part of the constitution that provides cover for the NRA.  At our current pace, we will continue to bury too many victims of gun violence each month.

The Second Amendment emerged out of a context unique to a new nation.  When it was ratified, America’s leaders relied upon the militia for local defense, to punish Indians, and control slaves, and in a nation separated from its imperial rivals by the Atlantic, the militias were adequate.   They distrusted standing armies. But the conditions from which the second amendment emerged obviously no longer apply.  Repealing the Second Amendment would deprive no one of their guns, but it would empower the Congress and state legislatures to do something effectively to end the slaughter.  Some jurisdictions will act with decision to limit magazines and increase background checks, and others will not.  But let’s get rid of this antiquated and blood-drenched amendment.  Let us not wait for the most determined advocate of gun rights to decide that too many have died.

Current Events, History and Historians, Race and Racism

Creative Destruction: Or, Let’s Bash Some Monuments

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It’s what we do, at least metaphorically. For historians, the destruction of monuments can be a good thing, a visceral and often-times important act of revision. It is an opportunity to replace dated and damaging interpretations of the past with more complicated, nuanced, and correct stories. We do not necessarily need to destroy Confederate statues to do this, but certainly we can reinterpret them, knock them down a few pegs, and re-write the stories that these racist monuments to white supremacy attempt to tell. Stick them in a museum, if you want, but let’s not pretend these are sacred sites.

There was a news story I caught at the end of last week.  Among the many vicious clowns and tiki-torch bearing, racist weenies in Charlottesville, was Mr. Jerrod Kuhn, a graduate of Honeoye Falls-Lima High School. It’s about ten miles from where I live. Kuhn was photographed marching with the white supremacists while they chanted “Jews Will Not Replace Us,” “Blood and Soil,” and “White Lives Matter.”  Kuhn said, however, that he was neither a Nazi nor a white-supremacist.  Rather, he was a “moderate Republican”(!) marching to protest efforts to eliminate statues and monuments commemorating the Confederacy and the cause for which it stood–White Supremacy.  When some of Kuhn’s anti-fascist neighbors saw his picture with the marchers, they publicized this bit of news, arguing that local residents should know that there is a Nazi in town.  And Kuhn cried foul. He was afraid. Some of his neighbors were being mean to him.  Boo-Freakin-Hoo. If you dance with the devil, people are going to think you are a sinner, and the monuments Kuhn marched to protect and which commemorated the Confederacy were erected not immediately after the Civil War, but several decades later, at the beginning of the Jim Crow era.  It is an interpretation of the Civil War that has endured, in the face of all the evidence, for far too long. If taking down statues which lionize slave-owners who were willing to kill US Soldiers in order to hang on to their human property and the system of white supremacy that lay at the bedrock of southern society is what’s at stake, then let them fall.

I have thought a lot about Charlottesville.  I have thought about the President’s support for the so-called “Alt-Right” movement.  As I mentioned in a post last week, I really do not care what the President says: systems of white supremacy are deeply ingrained. Trump has emboldened the Nazis and the Troglodytes, but those people have been living under rocks quite contentedly for generations, surfacing periodically. Even though Steve Bannon has lumbered away from the White House, and Donald Trump is saying whatever the hell it is that he occasionally says, white supremacy will endure. It is institutional, and it is part of what we are as a nation.

I have thought, however, about what all of this might mean to those of us who teach and study Native American history, a field in which we might not discuss white supremacy enough.

After I moved to Montana in 1994, one of my first trips was to visit the Little Bighorn Battlefield site, about an hour or so away from Billings.  In the small visitor’s center stood a iron plaque, about a yard square, that had been placed at the battlefield by Native American activists in the summer of 1988.  It read,

In honor of our Indian Patriots who fought and defeated the U.S. calvary. In order to save our women and children from mass-murder. In doing so, preserving rights to our Homelands, Treaties and Sovereignty. 6/25/1988 G. Magpie, Cheyenne.

You can read about the history of this plaque here.  It was a protest.  An attempt to replace one monument with another, a somber remembrance of the men Custer led to their deaths in June of 1876 with a monument commemorating the efforts of the Lakota warriors who fought to protect their homelands, even if the battle took place in Crow Country. Some viewed the plaque as an act of vandalism.  But it forced a conversation. Custer was no hero.  His men fought to eliminate Lakota people, to take their homelands, and the mineral wealth that lie beneath it.  The native peoples who fought them were not obstacles to progress.  But that is how they were depicted.

The protest mattered. It gained attention.  It forced a conversation, a reconsideration.  The National Park Service responded.  When a permanent monument was erected at the battlefield site in 2003, the native peoples who participated in that protest, who defied the rangers and cemented their iron plaque over the list of Custer’s dead cavalrymen, came as invited guests.

History is not merely a collection of facts.  You can see, for instance, how Custer has been depicted over the years.  Walt Whitman described him as a Christ-like figure, one who sacrificed himself in the name of western civilization and the conquest of the American West.

From far Dakota’s canyons,
  Lands of the wild ravine, the dusky Sioux, the lonesome stretch, the
      silence,
  Haply to-day a mournful wall, haply a trumpet-note for heroes.

  The battle-bulletin,
  The Indian ambuscade, the craft, the fatal environment,
  The cavalry companies fighting to the last in sternest heroism,
  In the midst of their little circle, with their slaughter’d horses
      for breastworks,
  The fall of Custer and all his officers and men.

  Continues yet the old, old legend of our race,
  The loftiest of life upheld by death,
  The ancient banner perfectly maintain’d,
  O lesson opportune, O how I welcome thee!

  As sitting in dark days,
  Lone, sulky, through the time’s thick murk looking in vain for
      light, for hope,
  From unsuspected parts a fierce and momentary proof,
  (The sun there at the centre though conceal’d,
  Electric life forever at the centre,)
  Breaks forth a lightning flash.

  Thou of the tawny flowing hair in battle,
  I erewhile saw, with erect head, pressing ever in front, bearing a
      bright sword in thy hand,
  Now ending well in death the splendid fever of thy deeds,
  (I bring no dirge for it or thee, I bring a glad triumphal sonnet,)
  Desperate and glorious, aye in defeat most desperate, most glorious,
  After thy many battles in which never yielding up a gun or a color,
  Leaving behind thee a memory sweet to soldiers,
  Thou yieldest up thyself.

A century later, Richard Mulligan portrayed Custer in “Little Big Man” as an unhinged madman, a preening martinet, in love with his own reflection, and lusting for Indian blood.  He spouted lines that would have sounded familiar to a movie audience exhausted and angry about the Vietnam War. He represented all the foolishness, the arrogance, and the stupidity that led the United States into an imperial war it could not win.  Custer, Westmoreland, light at the end of the tunnel, we must always advance.  It was a stunning revision of Custer’s carefully cultivated image.

Interpretations change.  Monuments are not history. They are interpretations of history.  And as such, they are not sacred.  They are open to challenge, to question.  And if the claims they make are wrong or over-simplified or pernicious–Custer was heroic, or the South fought for “States’ Rights,” for example– than they ought to be replaced, revised, rewritten.  My point is that we historians, when we do our jobs well, destroy monuments ALL. THE. TIME.  We ask tough questions.  We challenge long-cherished assumptions.  We are not precious, and we should hold nothing sacred but a determination to work the sources thoroughly and honestly in order to get the story right.

And then there is the story of Juan de Oñate’s foot.  A statue of the Spanish Conquistador, considered a “Founding Father” of New Mexico, stood in the town of Alcalde.  In January of 1998, as the 400th anniversary of his arrival in New Mexico approached, protestors armed with a chainsaw cut the right foot off the statue.  For them, this conquistador was no hero. They were, in effect, writing an alternative version of the Oñate story, commemorating the violent Spaniard’s brutal order to cut the right foot off of two dozen Acoma Pueblo prisoners who had resisted his advance.  I wrote about this event in Native America. The sculptor repaired the statue, but the missing foot never was returned.

We can call this act vandalism, or the destruction of public property, the sort of stuff that Vice-President Mike Pence has said he deplores.  It was those things, but it also was an act of reinterpretation, of historical revision. Douglas Seefeldt made this point in a paper entitled “Oñate’s Foot: Histories, Landscapes, and Contested Memories in the Southwest,” published in Across the Continent: Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and the Making of America, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2005. Seefeldt edited this volume, along with Jeffrey L. Hantman and Peter Onuf. While some might excuse Oñate’s violence, and celebrate his founding of the Spanish province that became the state of New Mexico, and his bringing the cattle industry to what became the American Southwest, the people who removed the foot from the statue reminded New Mexicans of another side to the story, and demonstrated that history consists of many narratives and many voices.  Not all these voices are heard.  Not all of them are listened to.  And sometimes, to register, to move the debate, dramatic acts are necessary.

I like this poem that tells the story of the removal of Oñate’s foot, and the subsequent celebration of another, larger, statue of the conquistador erected near El Paso:

“The Right Foot of Juan De Oñate”By Martín Espada

On the road to Taos, in the town of Alcalde, the bronze statue
of Juan de Oñate, the conquistador, kept vigil from his horse.
Late one night a chainsaw sliced off his right foot, stuttering
through the ball of his ankle, as Oñate’s spirit scratched
and howled like a dog trapped within the bronze body.
Four centuries ago, after his cannon fire burst to burn hundreds
of bodies and blacken the adobe walls of the Acoma Pueblo,
Oñate wheeled on his startled horse and spoke the decree:
all Acoma males above the age of twenty-five would be punished
by amputation of the right foot. Spanish knives sawed through ankles;
Spanish hands tossed feet into piles like fish at the marketplace.
There was prayer and wailing in a language Oñate did not speak.
Now, at the airport in El Paso, across from Juárez,
another bronze statue of Oñate rises on a horse frozen in fury.
The city fathers smash champagne bottles across the horse’s legs
to christen the statue, and Oñate’s spirit remembers the chainsaw
carving through the ball of his ankle. The Acoma Pueblo still stands.
Thousands of brown feet walk across the border, the desert
of Chihuaha, the shallow places of the Río Grande, the bridges
from Juárez to El Paso. Oñate keeps watch, high on horseback
above the Río Grande, the law of the conquistador rolled
in his hand, helpless as a man with an amputated foot,
spirit scratching and howling like a dog within the bronze body.

Interpretations of Native American history are everywhere, and I often encourage students to seek them out, to engage them in a debate, to interrogate their biases and assumptions.  Good comes from this.  Every day from first through sixth grade I saw this mural on the wall of Our Lady of Assumption Church in Ventura, where I grew up and went to elementary school.  It presents a rosy picture of the arrival of the Spanish priests at Mission San Buenaventura, one not at all consistent with how scholars see that encounter today.  Nobody has suggested removing this mural to my knowledge, but it stands testament to an interpretation highly favorable to the Catholic Church.

We write history; we do not create monuments. Our purpose is not civic education or instilling patriotism. As I have said before, history is the study of continuity and change, measured across time and space in peoples, institutions, and cultures.  That requires asking tough questions, researching relentlessly, and presenting answers that are sometimes painful to hear.  And too much of the history that has been included on these Confederate monuments and monuments to conquistadors and conquerors is, quite simply, bad history.

In two weeks the town of Geneseo, where my college is located, will be commemorating the 1797 “Treaty of Big Tree.” It is a big deal in town. As a guest of the college, you might stay in the Big Tree Inn.  Dining halls on campus are named after Mary Jemison, who knew much about the treaty, and Red Jacket, who got screaming drunk before he signed it.  For those who do not want to drink where students drink, the tavern at the Big Tree is one of a small handful of choices along Geneseo’s short main street.  If you want to take in the sights, you can go to the Livingston County Historical Society, spitting distance from the campus, and see what its curators claim is an actual piece of the “Big Tree,” under which the treaty was negotiated.  And according to a historical marker located in a campus parking lot, this treaty was significant.  The sign reads, “Treaty Of Big Tree:  Site Of Memorable Treaty Releasing Seneca Title To 3,600,000 Acres Of Land September 15, 1797.”

Releasing title.  3. 6 million acres.  Wow.  This treaty was an alcohol-soaked affair in which Thomas Morris, the non-bankrupt son of the bankrupt financier of the American Revolution and not-too-successful land speculator Robert Morris, employed bribery and alcohol to obtain signatures to a grotesquely corrupt real estate transaction. The Senecas, who had little choice, signed over the right to nearly all of the land in New York State west of the Genesee River save for eleven reservations. Over time, those reservations were whittled down to four, and then two, and now three.  In return for this massive cession, and the bribes he agreed to pay several Seneca leaders, Thomas Morris invested $100,000 dollars in stock of the Bank of the United States, the interest of which was paid to the Senecas most years thereafter.  Some years the amount came to nearly six thousand dollars; other years it was half that.  Why did this happen?  Stuart Banner answers tough questions like this in his excellent How the Indians Lost Their Land, a book I use in my Indian Law course.  The territory was massive; the Senecas’ population small.  The speculators and the settlers were coming.  Better to sell now, get something, and preserve a few key locations than walk away empty-handed. Dispossession.  Land loss. The removal from homes and homelands.  That story is given short-shrift in the celebratory histories of Geneseo and Livingston County. Signs like this one, as the Haudenosaunee scholar Rick Hill has argued, should be re-written.   Rick put together a pamphlet some years ago in which he wrote brief retorts to these ethnocentric markers that seemingly justify the dispossession of Haudenosaunee people and the resulting Iroquois diaspora.

So to those of you who marched in Charlottesville, or sympathize with them, let me make this clear: when we historians suggest that your markers and monuments ought to come down, we are not trying to steal your history and heritage.  History belongs to no one and your heritage, well, good luck with that.  You are on your own. We are suggesting that the interpretation of the past that you cling to, rather, is not only incorrect and oversimplified, but in some cases pernicious and a justification for past evils and continuing historical crimes. We hope we can reason with you, and persuade you with evidence to see things our way.   We are educators, after all, who have spent our adult lives studying history.  We know some stuff. (Some of the other people complaining about you? Yeah, they think you’re racist assholes, and some of them want to beat you up, but I don’t speak for them).  Facts, evidence, explanation: That is the world of the historian.  Myth, fantasy, and ideological comfort food–that is where the monument boosters stand.  Our goals are different. Yours are about justifying your views of the past.  Ours?  We like to think that we are speaking and writing about the truth.

And here’s a challenge for those of you who do not like what we say.  I tell my students this every semester. Ask us for the evidence.  I promise you, we will do the same.  We will support our claims with evidence, and ask that you do, too. If you hear something that you do not believe, ask us for the proof.   That is fair. I tell my students, it is entirely fair for them to ask their history professors not only, “What is the evidence for this claim?” but, also, “So What? Why does this story matter?” No historian worth his or her salt will be threatened by that question.  We can take it.  Can you?

 

Current Events, Race and Racism

Why I Should Probably Boycott the NFL this Season

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It’s not because the Buffalo Bills will be terrible.  As a long-suffering fan, I am used to all that the Bills give their supporters–strange draft choices, poor coaching, fluky management, and a game-day environment that all-too-often can resemble an afternoon on the Ice Planet Hoth but with way more shitty, over-priced beer.

In part, it is because of the increasing evidence of the danger of the sport.  Years ago, both of my sons played football in high school.  Today, I would try to persuade them to do something else.  There is something truly disturbing about supporting a “game,” or business, that produces thrills and excitement to be sure, but also broken bodies and damaged brains. The NFL has made some token gestures to try to make the sport more safe, but it does not seem like they have done enough. Maybe they can’t do much.  Maybe it is only a matter of time, as Arizona Cardinals Quarterback Carson Palmer once said, before a hard hit kills a player on the field.  Wonder what the League’s contingency plan for that event is.  Would you be surprised if the game went on? Cart him off, stick him on ice, and snap the ball.

Partially it is the treatment of former San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has been blackballed by NFL owners and management for first deciding to take a knee during the National Anthem in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.  His protest was respectful and never “disruptive.” His teammates said he never was a “distraction.” Kaepernick is not a bad guy, and he has put his money behind his actions, supporting parolees, for instance, by giving them new suits.  His treatment by the NFL is appalling. I have never played football, but I refuse to believe he is a worse player than some of the 70 some quarterbacks who will be on NFL rosters when the season begins in a couple of weeks.  I mean, have you watched the Jets? Jeez.  And I know the Bills could use him.  He is like Tyrod Taylor, only tall enough to see over the defensive line.  The political conservatism of the NFL is notorious, and its persecution and punishment of Kaepernick absolutely infuriates me.

And, in part, it is the NFL’s unwillingness to do anything at all about the Washington football team’s use of a racial slur as its team name.  Several years ago, I wrote an editorial which appeared in an Albany newspaper about the R-skins logo.  At the time, I honestly believed some progress was being made, that market forces and adverse decisions in the federal court system would increase pressure on or eliminate trademark protection for the team.  I wrote that “the Redskins name should go and likely will as pressure mounts on Redskins owner Dan Snyder and the NFL from prominent athletes, U.S. senators, native peoples, the general public, and most recently [Hilary} Clinton. The team will continue to protest. Its lawyers, predictably, will continue to fight. But it is only a matter of time. The mascot issue is a problem where the solutions can come easy, and it is an issue that growing numbers of non-Indians support.”

But I also felt in 2014 that it was an issue of less consequence than many of the others facing native peoples.

Forcing Daniel Snyder to change his team’s name likely will do little to help solve the significant problems facing native nations. While a growing number of non-Indian Americans have joined in efforts to counter offensive Native American mascots, they pay too little attention to more difficult issues that affect the lives of millions of Native American people.

Too many Indian communities, for instance, continue to struggle to enjoy the measured sovereignty permitted them by the most anti-Indian Supreme Court in American history. State and local governments mount aggressive campaigns designed to skim the cream off of the fragile prosperity that has emerged in some native communities, looking to tax gaming and retail businesses located on Indian land in opposition to a constitutional logic that has stood for almost 190 years. They challenge American Indian tribal sovereignty, and the pressure at times is relentless

Meanwhile, Native Americans have lower life expectancy, higher rates of death from cancer, injury and suicide, and are more likely to be poor, unemployed, and the victims of violent crime than their non-Indian neighbors.

These other problems facing Indian country are more vexing, the solutions more elusive, than abandoning a team nickname. What is to be done about poverty and unemployment and a lack of opportunity in Indian communities, all the bitter fruits of colonization and subjugation? What can be done to restore lands taken illegally, or for a fraction of their real value, from native peoples? What to do when federal courts have limited the religious rights of native peoples to worship as they so choose, and curtailed other freedoms as well?

I still feel that way, but the stubborn protection of the team’s name by the league and owner Daniel Snyder is deeply troubling.  The R-skins helmet insignia draws upon images from the Native American past.  Ask any non-native person to recite to you the images that come to mind when you say “Native American” or “American Indian.”  What images will come to their minds?  They will speak of images from the past, of leather, feathers, and beads. Snyder and many of the team’s fans assert that the name honors native peoples. Please. His is a patently stupid argument. By casting native peoples as part of the past, even if doing so was not meant to offend, it becomes easier to deny the just grievances of native peoples today.  No group of people in North America spends more time justifying and explaining their existence to white people as do Native Americans.  In the NFL, players can be fined for twerking.  They can be fined for pretending to slice the throat of an opponent, or for pretending to fire an arrow. But the NFL does nothing about a team nickname that depicts native peoples as savage and warlike, and feeds upon long enduring racist stereotypes.

I am surrounded by delusional Bills fans, those who despite all evidence expect the team to somehow end a playoff drought that is older than three of my children.  Like a burning car on the side of the road, it is sometimes difficult not to watch the Bills.  Despite my best intentions, I may find myself watching a portion of a game. But I will no longer be able to do that with a clear conscience.

Current Events, History and Historians, Liberal Arts

Intellectual Courage

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I gave the following keynote address to the annual meeting of NYSACAC, the New York state organization for high school and college admissions counselors, which took place at SUNY-Geneseo earlier this month. In some ways, it encapsulates what I tell my students each semester on the first day of class in my Humanities class.

 

I am delighted to be here, and to join those who have welcomed you here to our beautiful campus.  Geneseo, as a place, shows up in the historical documents long before Rochester existed, long before Monroe or Livingston counties, long before there was much of anything European established in what became the broader upstate region. It lays in the heart of the ancestral homeland of the Senecas, the keepers of the western door of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Longhouse.

Seneca soldiers and diplomats who lived in this Genesee valley played a role in the history of two empires, the French and the English, in the Iroquois League and Confederacy, and in the history of the native confederations that threatened the existence of the British Empire in America and then the young United States in the 1790s. They continued to live in this valley, at least some of them, even after Major-General John Sullivan led Continental forces through the Finger Lakes in 1779, burning crops and villages, and scorching the earth, as he went.  They were here in the 1790s and into the 1800s, before they moved to Allegany and Cattaraugus and Grand River in Canada.

Stories from the past.  I could tell you more: about Mary Jemison, the white woman of the Genesee.  She lived for a time as a captive, and adoptee, a refugee, and a Seneca homesteader down the road in what became Letchworth State Park, where you can see a statue of her and a replica cabin.  There are some documents with her mark on them in the county courthouse at the end of Main Street, where she deeded Seneca lands she claimed to white men associated with the Ogden Land Company, among whom numbered one of Geneseo’s founding fathers.  Her Seneca sons, who died violently, two of the three at the hands of their brothers, victims of the alcohol that could cut jagged holes in the fabric of Native American life.  There are New York State historical markers all over this county.  Biased, to be sure, but all telling historical stories about this part of New York State.

For nearly two decades, I have told stories like these to students at this school.  I have taught a lot of students over the years, and told a lot of stories. I am a historian.  That’s what we do.  I am interested in the past, and its connections to the present.  How things came to be.  Continuity and Change measured across time and space in peoples, institutions and cultures.  But all of that is just a way of saying that I am a guy that makes my living by asking questions.  And I love the questions—the search for evidence, the complexity and the lack sometimes of definitive answers, and the stories—the stories are at the heart of all that we historians do as teachers and writers.

I imagine that in your line of work you have stories that you can tell, too, stories of young people who have all sorts of challenges in front of them, or who survive trauma and neglect, some who have succeeded wildly and some who have broken your hearts.  I am sure you have stories of kids who are coming to you before they leave home to go to school, or to work, or into the service, or off to some experience—a gap year or a slack year or an adventure–and who want to begin writing their own stories for themselves, and perhaps by themselves, for the very first time.  These are stories, too, of continuity and change, of how things came to be, of being and becoming. Some of these young people are becoming competent and capable. Or they may be developing generosity and compassion, and some of them might be frightened and uncertain, sometimes for reasons that go deep into theirs and their family’s past, layers upon layers of stories you may have to disentangle if you want to understand them, where they are coming from, and where they hope to go. Some of them do not know what their story is going to look like, or how to begin writing it.

Like you, I have seen students who fall into all of these categories, students who, whatever they are feeling, can do so much to make this world—our world—a better place.

I can also imagine, and only imagine, the time constraints that you, and our colleagues who are out there in the classroom, work under in an era of increasing demands and declining resources. My teacher friends do so much, with so little, so often for people outside the building who have little understanding of what a good job actually looks like, who measure success in ways so foreign to the lived experience of you and your students.  And so it is with some trepidation that I propose to you today, if we are truly “dedicated to serving students as they explore options and make choices about pursuing postsecondary education” as Article I, Section 1 of your association’s by-laws read, that there is more that we can and should do for these young people who are so important to all of our futures.

My oldest daughter is one of these young people, She is at this point in her life where she interacts with her counselor a bit in high school, and talks with an occasional admissions representative.  She has entered this period that is so rich with opportunity and potential but also fraught with vulnerability. She is finishing up her junior year in high school. She has visited colleges and will visit some more and has begun to think when her way-too-busy schedule permits about what she might like to do with the rest of her life.  She has received all sorts of advice on what sort of story she might write, and she has received a lot of advice on how to navigate the college admissions process.  She has been plopped down in front of computers to navigate Naviance and see what her next step might look like. Programs to get her thinking about how to begin her story.

And based upon what I have seen as a parent and a professor, it seems to me that there is one area that is so essential to success in a college classroom, and especially at a liberal arts college like this one, that does not get talked about at high school enough: the importance of cultivating and encouraging intellectual fearlessness; to develop in young people the courage not to shy away from those things that seem to them–to all of us—to be extremely difficult. To master basic skills, of course. To be honest, curious, inquisitive, and relentless to be sure, but most of all, in terms of the questions they ask, the evidence they consider, the ideas they engage with, and the theses they advance, to be as fearless as they can be.  Now, on campuses like this, in this country, in this global community, more than ever.

Geneseo, as I have said, is still a liberal arts college. It’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot.  We integrate the liberal arts into the curriculum whatever a student’s major. We here at Geneseo wear that label, a liberal arts college, proudly, and many of us still hope our students will, too.

But that is a difficult—an increasingly difficult—thing for them to do. I imagine that some of the students you advise have heard the jokes about liberal arts and humanities majors.  They have worried parents who fear that their kids will not be able to take care of themselves without a “marketable” degree. Some of your students, before they arrive on campus, will already have been asked, “What are you going to do with that degree?”  Sometimes those questions can come from innocent curiosity, like, really, what are you going to do with that degree. But these questions can also come with a barbed tip, too, in the sense that the liberal arts and humanities are thought by some people out there to have limited value because, unlike the STEM fields and business and “the Art of the Deal,” the liberal arts are too often thought of as adding little of value.

The governor of Florida, for instance, a few years ago, argued that we do not need more anthropologists.  Another Floridian, a United States Senator, during his brief, quixotic run for the presidency said that we need “more plumbers and less philosophers.”  The Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky told students at Eastern Kentucky University that they should not bother studying history, and that since they attended a public college, funded by taxpayers—people who work—that they should do something useful to the Commonwealth.   Why should the state subsidize the study of French literature, the governor of that state asked.  What value does it add for Kentuckians?  Even in the SUNY system we have seen a diminishment in the perceived importance of the liberal arts, social sciences, and humanities.

And all of this is too bad, for I would argue that the study of these fields adds a lot, because they give us the cultural capital necessary to participate in a democratic society in a meaningful and constructive way.  But thinking in terms of nuances, complexities, ambiguities, shades of grey; being one of the people who embraces the big questions, pursues the answers over the long haul, who appreciates the value of open debate and discussion, who endeavors to find truth, and digs like a terrier for answers—people like that can find these times we live in rough sledding. People who ask fundamental questions about why things are the way that they are and how they ought to be—they can be perceived as threatening to those in power, which is why we see this assault on institutions like the National Endowment for the Arts and the NEH, which fund in a variety of ways arts and humanities projects that explore issues that cut to the marrow of the human condition.

Our students now live in a world that you and I have helped to create for them where too many people confuse their feelings and their fears for facts, where being smart and engaged and critical and willing to ask questions can make one an object of scorn.  They live in a world as well where complexity is so often dismissed, where big and difficult answers to the big questions are avoided, that asking these sorts of questions can take a certain amount of courage.

Let me give you an example. The former talk show host Bill O’Reilly used to have a segment on his shows where he sent a correspondent out to do “on the street” interviews where his goal was to expose the ignorance of the liberals he so often criticized on his show. One time the correspondent ran into a highly knowledgeable young guy, college-aged, who was more than willing to engage in a reasoned and informed debate and before he could get to his second sentence, Boom! “Nerd Alert!” flashed on the screen, as if being knowledgeable about public affairs and the world in which we live is a bad thing, something to make fun of.

Many Americans live in a world where they simply do not invest their time and energy to ask questions, stay informed. When we have a President who lies baldly to the press, and a press that is more concerned with ratings and clicks than in pursuing difficult stories, that is interested in fad and outrage and that has the attention span of a 2-year-old, we arrive at that dire point where the use of “alternative facts” can really be a thing that we can talk about with straight faces.  We, collectively, the mature adults in the room, have modeled some very, very, poor behavior.  We reason sloppily or lazily; we are dishonest, or cynical; we are cowards and grotesquely ill-informed.  For instance:

  • A sitting congressman told an audience that the theory of evolution and the Big Bang were “lies straight out of the pit of hell.”
  • The chairman of a Senate environmental panel brought a snowball into that august chamber as proof that climate change is a hoax.
  • When only 36% can find North Korea on a map, and that remaining majority is far more likely to favor military action against a nuclear power led by a deranged mad man;
  • And when almost one in three Americans could not identify President Obama’s vice president, who was there for the entire eight years of his presidency,
  • We have come pretty close to bottoming out.

Think about this: Americans, according to a recent survey, are more likely to be able to identify any two members of the Simpson family than any one of the five freedoms protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, rights that now, as they have been at many points in the past, are under assault. (I known, you think Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, but maybe not quite as readily of press, religion, speech, petition and assembly).  22% of Americans can name all five members of the Simpson family, while only one in one thousand could name all five first amendment freedoms.

We are complacent in the face of inequality and injustice.  As the searing documentary “The 13th” pointed out, the United States has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the people who live their lives behind bars, and we are working hard to increase that percentage, if we are to believe the current United States Attorney General.  But think about that: One out of every four persons who is incarcerated ON EARTH  is imprisoned in the land of the free, and the home of the brave, though that freedom and that bravery is, at times, quite hard to find. People of color are imprisoned at rates far out of proportion to their share of the general population.

OXFAM reported in January of 2017 that 8 men, the wealthiest in the world, own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population.  8 men own as much wealth as the poorest 50%, 3.6 BILLION PEOPLE.  The wealth of these eight men grew by half a trillion dollars over the course of the preceding five years, while the wealth of the poorest 50% fell by 1 trillion. At the height of his fame, Michael Jordan was paid more than all the factory workers in all of Nike’s factories combined.

We have seen gun-craziness, racism, rising antisemitism, fear.  You know it is all there, and you can, I imagine, think of additional examples.  Violence.  White supremacists marching in New Orleans and Charlottesville to protect monuments explicitly commemorating white supremacy. The election of an incurious and juvenile president who has, at various times,

  • insisted that freedom of the press—part of that pesky first amendment—does not allow the press to criticize him;
  • that torture, specifically prohibited by American laws, should be brought back;
  • that we should wall ourselves off from the rest of the world;
  • claimed that women are objects who can be grabbed and groped at his pleasure; and that the norms and values and responsibilities of civil society and basic ethics simply do not apply to his family and favorites.
  • I cannot keep up with it all—every time I thought I was done writing this address, another bit of news…And here is the point:

Rational, reasoned, and just public policy is difficult if not impossible without an informed, engaged, and rationally-thinking public willing to ask tough questions, to engage.

Fear.  Many Americans live in fear: of immigrants and Islamist extremists–but a plastic surgeon botching your operation is more likely to kill you in the United States than a terrorist. Peanuts kill more Americans than terrorists, as John Oliver pointed out.  Yet we are told to be fearful.  And many of us do as we are told. People around the globe and in this country—some of them, anyways—seem to have more confidence in fear and anger and hate than in their opposites. With malice towards many, and charity for few; with little interest in heeding the call of the Old Testament prophets to care for the widows and comfort the fatherless, the weakest members of society, and to seek out injustice and correct oppression.

Our students are coming of age in this moment where a lot of really old issues—race and inequality and class and gender and violence and justice, are resurfacing in complicated and anguishing ways.  The problems are out there.  But to name them and to ask, “What can we do?” and to gather the information to solve them, that can be tough.  And so many of these problems we face are rooted, in part, in a rejection of critical thought, in an embrace of the irrational, and a society with these problems can fall prey to demagogues with their simplistic answers, and will find it difficult to display emotional maturity, and will be prone to violence.

What are we going to do about all of this?  I don’t know. But maybe if we are to make America great again, or as great as it might be, it might be the young people who you help send to a school like this one, who get a solid grounding in the liberal arts, whatever their majors, who will best see that “injustice anywhere” just may be a threat to justice everywhere.  And that if it is “an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny, that binds us, one to another,” as Martin Luther King once wrote, that these kids, these young men and women, may be among those best suited to do something about it.   So those of us at a school like this, we who think and reason; we, the people who read the footnotes–we can deploy that wisdom that not only makes our lives richer but makes the world a better place—–only if we have the courage to act, and to use it.

All of us, you and I, we need to do a better job with the young people we advise and teach.

After all, we live in and have helped to create a world where—when we stand up in the face of the problems before us and ask, “Why?” and when we insist on a reasoned and relevant response to that simple question—it’s like an act of subversion, and subversive acts, even the smallest ones, require a degree of courage, of fearlessness.

It can beat your down, if you let it. I see it occasionally on this campus.  Despair. Hopelessness.  Cynicism.  Especially cynicism. I worry that it can beat down the young people with whom we work, if we do not do a better job in equipping them to be intellectually fearless. Again, look at the spectacle of public life that we are in the process of bequeathing to this generation. We might forgive them for an easy slide into a deep cynicism, but we must emphasize that cynicism is an intellectually lazy position, a colossal cop out or a reflection of a feeling of powerlessness.

But these young people do have power.

It can take courage to trust and to respect and to appreciate, as well as to care and to love, and to accept the validity of ideas presented by those with whom we would be predisposed to think we might disagree.  To never underestimate others, to take people seriously, whoever that person happens to be, to accept the possibility that those with whom we disagree might have a point and, indeed, to admit that we might be wrong.  To appear vulnerable in the face of those who despise us.  It is not an easy thing for us, and it is not an easy thing for our students.  It takes courage, and a willingness—a true commitment—to approaching everything and everyone with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised.

It is so easy, and at a level perfectly understandable, to feel like the challenges we all face are too big and it is possible, I think, that we all feel at times like we are not enough to make a difference—that we need to be wealthier or have more expertise or access or a stronger prescription or whatever.  But what if the students we worked with used their skills and their thoughts and their reason and acted as if they were exactly what was needed? If we all knew we could work to close the gap between the way things are and the way things ought to be, even a little bit, would we have the courage to act? Would we really do it?

A long time ago I had a great history professor.  His name was Albie Burke.  He died about five years ago. And even though I left Cal State Long Beach where he taught in the late 1980s, I still got back to campus every other year or so to have lunch with him and to catch up, to talk about the Supreme Court, constitutionalism, politics, and all sorts of other things. We were both historians who sort of wanted to be lawyers.  I can remember feeling nervous and unprepared before having to present some of my work in seminar, my thesis project on two really big Supreme Court cases in the field of American Indian law.  And believe me, I was stressed out. We would meet in his very Spartan office, and he always made really incisive eye contact when you were speaking to him.  Bright, bright, blue eyes. He would listen very quietly, never interrupting.  Very comfortable with silences.  And then when you finished, spilling out your guts, telling him how you were not ready, he would pause for a few beats and then say:  “You will never be prepared. You still got to do it.”  He’d smile just a little bit as he said that. It was a tough lesson for some of his students, I think, but his point was that you can spend all your time worrying and fretting and fearing and preparing and not doing.  Fear can keep you from doing what needs to be done, in public life, and in terms of what you want for your own lives.  His daughter told a similar story at his memorial service about many conversations she had had with him just like that.  It is so easy to talk yourself out of pursuing your dreams, of tackling the challenges that may lie in front of you, and that lie in front of all of us.

It is this spirit that we must teach and nurture and cultivate.

How do we get there? Not by rubrics and grades and tests.  Not by slapping labels on kids without making clear to them that at the end of the day they will have to decide whether that label will serve as an explanation for their failures or an obstacle, however burdensome and unfair, that they will have to overcome if they are to succeed.

I know that I have a lot to learn still. I learn a lot from my students.  Maybe I do not know much at all.  But I do know this: Students do not become better people, or more courageous citizens, through exams and grading.  Students do not learn from many forms of assessment.  The tests and the grades we assign do nothing to make them better people. And yet we do this still. The non-profit ETS brings in over 1.6 billion dollars a year.

And when grades or test scores are used to as great an extent as they are at present to determine opportunity—to open doors for some students and close doors for others—they can have the effect of reinforcing inequalities and systematic injustices that have stood for far too long.

The grades your colleagues give, and the grades I give, and the subjects that many of us teach, may in fact matter less for the scores and the content that we are mandated to cover than for what we give to our students to help them to learn to think, and reason, and ask tough questions.  Students will remember how we made them feel, if we made them feel, more than any of the subject matter we teach them. I am willing to bet that if you take a minute, and think back to the time you spent in class, in high school or in college, and what you remember from those classes, that you might agree with me.  I hope so.

Maybe we can be the types of teachers who worry less about grades and missed deadlines, who will believe their excuses, and give out more “A’s.” I am walking proof, after all, that there is little relationship between high school and even undergraduate achievement and later academic success.   And nobody—NOBODY—will convince me that a sixteen or a seventeen or an eighteen-year old should have doors shut because they were not inspired or equipped by their overworked and underpaid teacher to complete their assignments, or able to place their rote work and assignments ahead of whatever crisis, great or small, was dominating their life.  Grades and test scores, to too great an extent, measure the dutiful but not the beautiful parts of our students.

Students.  I have used that word a number of times in this talk, but it is important to remember that we are talking here about young people—people like us years ago– with potential and with dreams who are still learning where their talents lie.  And we need those dreamers.  Stargazers.  That’s what Plato called them.

Here’s what a student of mine wrote for her Humanities final just a month ago. Humanities is a course that we used to really value here, and that used to make Geneseo special and unique.  I gave the students an essay by Roger Rosenblatt that appeared last fall in The Atlantic in which he reflected on his long career as a war correspondent, and the seemingly limitless capacity of people for inhumanity and barbarism.  It is powerful, heartbreakingly beautiful essay. The assignment, in the end, asked students to write about human nature, justice, and the problem of evil, as the contemplated this article, and works by Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Augustine, More, the Bible, Shakespeare, and some others I am not remembering.  “The question remains,” this very talented student wrote, “how do we account for all of the hatred, violence, and injustice that we witness? What words do we use to describe it? How can we possibly rationalize it and make sense of it? Where do we find its opposite in the world, and how do we eagerly point at that, so as to say, ‘See, this is also us. This is also me.’

“In a world and a human history overwhelmed by hatred, violence, and injustice, what counters it, I argue, is love, compassion, faith, and the courage to rise above it.”

Maybe we should refuse the rubric, and ignore the scores.  Look for the beautiful.  This rising generation of students is already better than us in important ways—their open-mindedness, their tolerance, their acceptance of difference. I really believe that. Encourage courage. We have a lot of influence.  Or at least we have the potential to be highly influential:  a cruel or an uncaring word from us, for example, even when cast off thoughtlessly or uncritically, or because we are stressed out or too busy, can do so much damage, while a kind word, a single note of encouragement, can do something that these students will remember for the rest of their lives, something that can help them write a beautiful life story.

So let’s do better.  Let’s encourage fearlessness, even where we have failed to demonstrate it ourselves.  I feel that I have the best job in the world. Really. There is nothing else that I can imagine doing because, like you, I get to spend my time talking to young people, many of whom are optimistic, who are neither jaded nor cynical but see the world as one with so much potential. And it is, for those with the courage to act.  How cool is that?

And each and every day, I have the opportunity, if I choose to truly be present, to truly listen, to be awed by their achievements, humbled by the obstacles they have overcome to get to this college, inspired by their creative thinking, pushed by their challenging questions, and amazed by the alacrity with which so many of them seek out injustice, attempt to correct oppression, and in thousands of small ways show the vital courage to make the world—our world—a better place.

I have enjoyed this opportunity to speak to you.  I thank you for listening, for giving me some of your time, and I hope that you enjoy and benefit from your time here at Geneseo, at this conference, and at this beautiful campus.

 

Current Events, Native Americans, Race and Racism, Red Lives Matter

#NativeLivesMatter

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Two important stories came across the line yesterday, and those of us who teach Native American history need to do a better job of following them.  On June 5, police officers killed Zachary Bearheels, a twenty-nine year old man with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Bearheels was punched in the head and shocked by a taser several times.  Omaha police have admitted that the officers’ conduct was a violation of departmental policy and that two of the officers involved would be terminated. 

According to the story reported on the Indian Country Today Media Network, Bearheels had been traveling from South Dakota to Oklahoma City aboard a bus. After a passenger complained about his conduct, he was kicked off and left stranded in Omaha.  Bearheels was behaving in a manner that police were called by witnesses.  He was attacked and abused by the police. Witnesses, and the internal reports of the Omaha Police Department, both indicated that Bearheels posed no threat and that the violence was entirely unjustified, and “egregious violations of the Omaha Police Department’s policy procedures and training on the use of force and the use of a taser.”

 

Bearheels’ death at the hands of the Omaha Police is one more example of the larger problem reported in a story looking at “The Police Killings No One is Talking About” that appeared In These Times. The story was written by Stephanie Woodard, and the evidence she presents is harrowing.  Police killed twenty-one Native Americans in 2016, up from 15 in 2014.  According to a 2014 study from the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice, Native Americans are more likely to be killed by police than any other demographic in the United States. Native Americans are 3.1 times more likely to be killed by the police than white Americans.

Joseph Murphy, for example, a thirty-three year old veteran of the Iraq War:  He died of a heart attack in a holding cell in a Juneau jail.  He had called for help, but guards yelled “Fuck You” and “I don’t care” in response to his pleas for medical assistance. Others were shot sitting in cars, or while holding knives, or while distraught and unwilling to listen to police demands that they comply. In nearly every case, the homicides were ruled justifiable.

And the parallels to what we have witnessed in the African-American community are clear.  Many reservation border towns are rife with racism and discrimination against native peoples.  I saw this first hand in Hardin, where I attempted to conduct interviews nearly twenty years ago. I had heard some of my Crow students describe the racism they faced at Hardin High School. I wanted to get at relations between the Crows and their white neighbors.  I was not able to immerse myself in the community deep enough to get white people to talk to me, but the problems were not hard to see there.   And in Billings, sixty miles from Crow, where I lived, and where native peoples were a despised and unwelcome minority.  Expressions of racism towards native peoples were, to me, shockingly common and public.

I have spent a large part of my career, in a sense, writing about white violence against native peoples. In my first book, I looked at the violence of the Anglo-American frontier, and the sources of the racial antipathy that took route there .  I wrote about the race wars pitting native peoples against land-hungry settlers in New England and the Chesapeake in the seventeenth centuries.  I wrote about the murder of an Algonquian weroance near Roanoke Island in 1586, and the consequences of that violent act.  In my relatively recent book on Canandaigua, I wrote about the violence on the Pennsylvania and New York frontier, where the unpunished murder of Senecas by frontier whites served as one of the major grievances American officials and Haudenosaunee diplomats needed to address.   I could teach my courses in Native American history focusing on acts of violence every day if I wished, from Roanoke to Jamestown, to Marblehead to the Lancaster Workhouse to Gnaddenhutten and Sand Creek, from Wounded Knee to Omaha and border towns throughout Native America where, too often, law enforcement officers are ending the lives of native peoples.  It is an old, old story, this, and it needs to stop.

Black Lives Matter has brought massive attention to the slaughter of African Americans at the hands of police.  The entire Black Lives Matter movement has done such important work in focusing attention on racism and discrimination and violence perpetrated by police against African Americans. At the same time, as Woodard points out, “a larger narrative is at play: racial issues in the United States tend to be framed as black and whites, while other groups are ignored.”

I plan on assigning Woodard’s piece when I teach my Indian law class again next spring, and spend some time on this issue.  Students come to college inclined to think of native peoples as being part of the past.  Their understanding of civil rights and discrimination and race relations is, as Woodard points out, too often limited to thinking in terms of matters black and white.  They can only benefit by reading closely these powerful stories, and learning that the police, in all too many instances, are viewed as a threat by the people they are supposed to protect and serve.

 

Constitution, Current Events, Race and Racism

The Loving Decision and the Concealed History of Virginia’s Native Peoples

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Yesterday was the anniversary of the Pulse nightclub massacre that took place a year ago in Orlando, the largest mass shooting in recent US History.  It was also the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia, the case which struck down laws that prohibited marriage across the color line.

You may have seen the beautifully quiet and restrained telling of this story in last year’s Oscar-nominated film that starred Ruth Negga as Mildred Loving and Joel Edgerton as her devoted husband Richard.  The film avoided grandiose speeches, courtroom melodrama, and focused instead on the struggle of a couple, white and black, to hold things together in the Jim Crow south.

There was more to the story, however, for Mildred Loving always claimed that she was Native American, a descendant of Virginia’s native peoples.  This story is told in Sally Jacobs’  piece that appeared on WGBH. You might find Jacobs’ story useful in your classes.

[UPDATE: And you might find it useful for more than just the story.  Arica Coleman, mentioned below, wrote a fantastic book on this subject, and she has accused Jacobs of plagiarizing her work.  You should read Coleman’s criticism here and in the comments section which follows Jacobs’ piece.  Professor Coleman presents a powerful case, and we need to hear Jacobs’ response. MLO]

Mark Loving, Mildred’s grandson, contacted the Virginia Department of Historical Resources because he objected to the description of his grandmother on a state historical marker as “a woman of African-American and Virginia Indian descent.” So said Jacobs in her piece for WGBH. Mark Loving objected to the suggestion that Mildred Loving was anything other than a Native American woman.  “I know during those time that there were only two colors,” he said in an interview from last November, “but she was Native American.  Both her parents were Native American.  Mildred herself insisted in 2004 that she had no black relatives, according to Arica Coleman, who interviewed her for the fantastic book she wrote on mixed-race marriage.

Race is never simple, and Virginia’s history is a messy one.  In 1924, for instance, the Virginia legislature passed its “Racial Integrity Act” which defined white people as having “no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian.” The act included the so-called “Pocahontas exception,” stating that “persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed white persons.”  Many Virginians, blissfully unaware that some of Pocahontas’s descendants had sired children with slaves, attempted to tie themselves firmly to Virginia’s romantic past by claiming descent from Pocahontas. Their interests had to be protected. Anyone who was not white, under the provisions of the law, was “colored.”

I take some time with laws like these in my classes in order to explain to them how nonsensical and ridiculous all of this is at a fundamental level.  Race is a construction, an invented category. The blood that flowed through one’s veins did nothing to effect culture and belief and values and behavior.  Still, Virginians enforced the Racial Integrity Act with a vengeance, and the Commonwealth’s first registrar of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, Walter Ashby Plecker, was a true believer.  “Let us turn a deaf ear,” he wrote revealingly in 1925, “to those who would interpret Christian brotherhood as racial equality.”  Virginia Indians, he believed, were not real Indians: they had been mongrelized, mixed with peoples of African descent, and as such he ordered his employees to alter the birth certificates of Indian children.  This was erasure, an attempt at extermination carried out with pens and paper. The certificates now would read “colored.”  Plecker claimed that he had science on his side—the same “eugenics” that later fueled the Nazi holocaust—but he admitted to close friends that he routinely changed racial designations from Indian to colored without any evidence.

Plecker’s racist crusade made it difficult for many native peoples in Virginia to prove that they were Indians.  The vital records upon which such a designation relied, after all, had been altered.  Native peoples in Virginia asserted a third racial identity in a biracial society.  They did not attend black schools because they felt no necessity to accept Plecker’s logic.  Many wanted access to the better facilities available to white Virginians.  Some of those who could pass as white did so, but many of Wahunsonacock’s descendants struggled in the face of this racist legal code.

During the Second World War, Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier complained about Plecker’s strict enforcement of Virginia’s racist legal code but Plecker was convinced that thousands of “mulattoes” in Virginia “are striving to pass over into the white race by the Indian route.” Plecker determined to keep the races pure, and the lines between them distinct.  When a draft board in Richmond ordered three Rappahannock men to report to an induction station for African American soldiers in Maryland, they refused. Authorities in Virginia prosecuted the men and sentenced them to six months in prison.  The government allowed Chickahominy soldiers to serve in white units only after the tribe demonstrated its own racism toward African Americans:  Chickahominies who married black people faced expulsion from the community; they tried to keep African American farmers away from the reservation, and prohibited black doctors and preachers from visiting their communities.  Most of the Virginia Indians who served did so in white units, but not without an enormous struggle.

There were solid historical reasons for Mildred Loving’s family to claim to be Indians.  But people on the margins intermarried throughout the South.  They always did, and racial identity could be fluid on the marchlands of the empires and the colonial state.

As Jacobs shows, in Virginia, along Passing Road, where the Lovings lived and loved, there is today debate about Mildred Loving’s identity.  Who she is still is debated.  In an attempt to navigate these troubled waters, Jacobs reported, “the state of Virginia rewrote its highway marker to describe the Lovings simply as an interracial couple and removed all mention of her being either African-American or Native-American. But that didn’t quell the controversy.”

In the face of local opposition, the state last week moved the location of the highway marker away from a roadside several miles from the Lovings’ gravesite. It’s now to be near the former Virginia Court of Appeals in Richmond, where the Loving case was once heard, over an hour’s drive away. Despite the controversy, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe is set on Monday to dedicate the marker, which has been in storage for over a year.

That some of your students likely will have some familiarity with the recent film version of the Lovings’ story, and the recent salutary discussion across the country of how love must trump hatred, bigotry and racism, it might be useful to discuss this important case in Native American history classes.  And if not the Lovings’ story, there are similar cases throughout the American South, and throughout Native America.

 

 

 

 

#NoDAPL, Current Events

Rotten to the Core

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The recent story that appeared in The Intercept about the private security firm Tiger Swan, its cooperative intelligence-gathering with local, state, and federal law enforcement authorities, its propaganda work in behalf of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the sometimes-brutal tactics it used to protect the corporate “assets” of Energy Transfer Partners, the Fortune 500 company behind the construction of the DAPL, should be a much larger story than it is.  The Tiger Swan story reveals the rottenness that lies at the core of America’s continuing treatment of native peoples and their allies.

Tiger Swan, as revealed in the documents obtained and published by The Intercept,  produced intelligence briefings for law enforcement agencies, kept close tabs on the Water Protectors at Standing Rock, and may have infiltrated the protesters’ camp.  They spread disinformation on social media,

Police guard a bridge near Oceti Sakowin Camp on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on December 3, 2016 outside Cannon Ball, North Dakota, as Native Americans and activists from around the country gather at the camp trying to halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. / AFP / JIM WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

measuring the influence of their posts and stories, and may have kept something like an “Enemies List” to trace leaders of the protest movement.  All of this in the name of a corporation, the business interests of which they protected against an overwhelmingly peaceful protest movement run by people worried that the DAPL could jeopardize waters flowing through the Standing Rock Reservation.  To the mercenaries at Tiger Swan, the protesters were “jihadists” and they should be countered using similar tactics.

Fort Apache, the Bronx.  You remember that.  Or American soldiers in Vietnam marching out on patrol into “Indian Country.”  The supposedly warlike qualities of native peoples and the supposedly violent lands on which they lived have been transposed time and again as a way for American soldiers and officers to comprehend whatever conflict they engaged in.  These soldiers enter the theater in Apache helicopters, following the Tomahawk cruise missiles that preceded them.

Here, the scenario is flipped. The Jihadists that American forces fight in other parts of the world provide the language for Tiger Swan’s understanding of the #NoDAPL movement and, in effect, their lens for understanding native peoples at home attempting to protect their quality of life.  The language of war, of insurgency, has returned to Native America.

I have written about Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL movement before, so you know how I feel about it. If you are reading this blog, chances are you read about the protests, watched the DIY reporting from the protestors themselves, or saw the courageous on-the-ground journalism by Amy Goodman, her colleagues at “Democracy Now!” and other media sources.  Some of those reporters put their bodies on the line to bring this story to you and me.

You also will remember, no doubt, the images of private security forces roughing up the Water Protectors.  Painful images.  Disturbing.  Police dogs.  Military vehicles.  Body armor, automatic weapons, violence.

 

IF YOU WATCH or listen to right-wing media, you will learn that left-leaning college students, protesting on their campuses, are the major threat to freedom of thought, speech, and expression. Coddled and intolerant, the story goes, these fragile snowflakes will not expose themselves or allow others to be exposed to ideas with which they disagree. They will drown out the voices of those whose ideas they oppose.  You read about the protests at Middlebury.  And maybe you saw the recent news coming out of Evergreen State College in Washington. Be afraid of the students, we are told, and too many people seem willing to comply.

I am going to use this Intercept piece in my Native American history class in the fall. I may use it the first day, or I might assign it at the end. Whichever, I feel my students need to see this stuff, think about it, and remember that the power of history can hang heavy on the backs of too many Americans. It might rile the students up.  Maybe they will protest.  Maybe they will get pissed and start breaking shit.  More likely, if they are good history students—and most of them are—they will see this story for what it is.

In recent weeks, David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon has gained a lot of attention.  He tells the story of the murder of oil-rich Osages in the early twentieth century. It is a riveting story.  Historians have known about the Osage murders for a long time, but it is good that Grann brought it to the attention of a broader public.  Its significance should be clear.

From Jamestown to Standing Rock, from the Virginia Company of London to Energy Transfer Partners, the partnership of corporate and business interests with the forces of the centralized state has been a constant in American history.  This is not partisan.  Tiger Swan was doing business during the Obama presidency.  It continued its work under Creon Trump.

I reason here from the premise that no corporate asset is more valuable than a single human life.  Yet, as I write, I read about how state after state is trying to enact measures to criminalize protest.  I listen to the recording of Montana’s new congressman pummeling one reporter (who cannot fight back) and read how the tough-guy governor of Texas took a break from tormenting LGBTQ kids to joke about shooting others.

It is abundantly clear that the forces of suppression and violence that have been part of the lived experience of peoples of color on this continent for centuries are now threatening to affect non-native peoples in unprecedented and alarming ways.

There is a wonderfully revealing passage in Vine Deloria’s famous book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. “When the Kennedys and King were assassinated,” Deloria wrote, “people wailed and moaned over the ‘sick’ society.  Most people took the assassinations as a symptom of a deep inner rot that had suddenly set in.  They needn’t have been shocked. America has been sick for some time. It got sick when the first Indian treaty was broken. It has never recovered.”

Dakota Access, and the sorts of collusion between law enforcement, corporate interests, and for-profit armies like Tiger Swan, show that the sickness Deloria described is still here. Indeed, it has festered, become malignant, and done its damage in new ways in this new world order. Tiger Swan did its work during the Obama years.  It continues its work now.  It continues to protect ETP’s corporate assets.  The sickness runs deep. The rottenness is profound. If, as Felix Cohen once wrote, native peoples, “like the miner’s canary,” mark “the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere,” then “our treatment of Indians…reflect[s] the rise and fall in our democratic faith.”

Let’s not forget Tiger Swan.  Let’s remember that history is not only part of the past.

Current Events

Federal Recognition for Virginia Native Peoples?

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Progress for Pocahontas’s people seeking federal recognition.  The United States House of Representatives last week approved by a voice vote the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act, H. R. 984.  The Senate approved its version of the measure back in March. For background on who Thomasina Jordan was, you can read this resolution brought before the Virginia House in January 2000, a short time after her death.

According to the report in indianz.com, the measure would apply to the Chickahominy Tribe, the Chickahominy Indian Tribe – Eastern Division, the Upper Mattaponi, the Rappahannocks, the Monacans and the Nansemond Tribe. “All have agreed,” according to the report, “to a prohibition on gaming and all will be able to follow the land-into-trust process if the measure becomes law.”

This measure is important, and if you have read Native America, you will know well the challenges these communities have faced in their efforts to obtain federal recognition: Warfare, dispossession, and enslavement, to be sure, but also the efforts of people like Walter Ashby Plecker to eliminate Virginia’s native peoples from the historical record, genocide by erasure.  I write about Plecker in Native America, but your students might enjoy as well this piece from a couple of years back that appeared in Richmond’s Style Weekly. It’ll be certain to get a discussion going.

Yet despite the bipartisan support for the measure, there are still obstacles.  The president, of course, is a wild card, and he is mired enough in problems of his own making that it may take a herculean effort to bring the measure to this attention.  And then there are members of the Senate who, in the past, have objected to Congressional recognition of American Indian tribes.  The process, they assert, should follow the protocol laid out in the 1978 Federal Acknowledgment statute.  Three times the House has approved this measure.  But because one of those senators, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, has retired, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine is optimistic that this time the outcome might be different.   “We are correcting a historical injustice that we’ve endured since,” said Chickahominy chief Stephen Adkins, “you know Jamestown in 1607, and we just have not been accorded the dignity that we should be accorded as native people.”

I like to assign my students the text of the 1978 statute. I use the edited version in Prucha’s Documents of United States Indian Policy, a reference work I generally assign in the survey course.  The Office of Federal Acknowledgment, which oversees the BIA process spelled out in the statute, has a website that is not easy to use, but might reveal to students something of the complexity of the federal bureaucracy and the sort of work required to submit an acknowledgment petition. The standards the 1978 statute sets for federal recognition for native peoples are extraordinarily difficult for many native communities to meet.  The process is expensive and time-consuming. The problems the current BIA process creates have been addressed extraordinarily well in the volume edited by Amy E. Den Ouden and Jean M. O’Brien entitled Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2013.  There are some other works listed in the Manual for Instructors and Students if you want to read more deeply.

Because Congress has plenary authority over Indian affairs, it can grant recognition apart from the clunky BIA process.  It has not done so since the middle of the 1990s.  That is a shame.  The BIA process needs repair.  That is a truth acknowledged by everyone with a stake in the process.  Let’s hope that this time, the Senate and the President support the recognition of these native peoples who greeted the soldiers and settlers who planted the first permanent English settlement in North America.

Current Events, Party Platforms, Uncategorized

The Trump Administration Keeps Alive Fears of Termination

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In the midst of all the other foreboding news coming out of Washington, it is difficult for me sometimes to follow Indian affairs as closely as I would like. Nonetheless, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recently made some comments that caught my attention.

Several weeks ago on this blog I suggested that fears of a return to Termination under President Trump are overblown.  The Indian policy of the United States for roughly the quarter-century following the Second World War, Termination included a number of related components, together which were designed to get the United States government out of the “Indian business.”  I discuss the termination era in Chapter Nine of Native America.  If you want to read more about it, check out the materials in the Manual.  I have some suggested readings and the relevant documents available for your use.

First, there was the Indian Claims Commission, established by act of Congress in 1946.  The ICC would settle claims Indian tribes had against the United States for the value of lands illegally or unfairly seized at the time that seizure took place.  An urbanization program was designed to assimilate Indians into American mainstream by encouraging them to leave their reservations for American cities. The states, meanwhile, through PL 280 and other enactments, were encouraged by Congress to extend their criminal and civil jurisdiction over Indian Country. Finally, a series of “termination acts” formally ended all relations between certain Native American communities and the United States. If terminated tribes were to continue their business enterprises, one option left open to them was to incorporate.

At the beginning of May at the National Tribal Energy Summit, Secretary  Zinke suggested that it was “time for a dialogue” on the “1934 Indian Reorganization Act,” the centerpiece of the so-called Indian New Deal which preceded the Termination era.

The IRA was an incredibly significant piece of legislation, and the brainchild of John Collier, who served as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1933 until 1945.  The IRA encouraged tribes to write tribal constitutions (many of these governing instruments remain in effect) and corporate charters to allow them to develop reservation resources.  The IRA formally ended the disastrous policy of Allotment, and placed remaining reservation lands into federal trust. Collier envisioned a reservation future for native peoples, and the transformation of Indian reservations from prisons into homelands.

For some listeners, Zinke seemed to question the utility and continued relevance of the IRA innovations.  “What are we going to be 100 years from now?” he asked.  Will the lands belonging to native peoples continue to be held in trust forever?  “Is there an off-ramp? If I offered today that the tribe would have a choice of leaving the Indian trust lands and becoming a 501c3 corporation, another entity, some tribes would take it.”

It is not clear what Zinke was trying to say.  Perhaps he was suggesting a proposal to take lands out of trust.  Perhaps he was contemplating for the Lower 48 states something akin to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which divided up lands and left them to the control of native corporations.  It is hard to say.  It was a careless statement.

Zinke did say “quite frankly” about the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is placed administratively within the Interior Department, that “I’m not sure in many ways we’re value added.”  This much is true.  The Bureau of Indian Affairs has badly mismanaged its trust responsibilities in the past, and there is no secret that Zinke wants to make it easier for Indian tribes in the west to develop their natural resources as they see fit.  “My job,” Zinke said, “is to make sure that if you want to, to get out of your way so you can do it, to be helpful, to be the advocate in your corner, so sovereignty is a word that has meaning. And consultation is not a last minute idea.”  He wanted to help tribes develop their oil, gas, and mineral resources “so we as a nation can have infrastructure.  And why does energy matter anyways? Well, it matters if you are going to have a job. In some tribes, coal or energy is the only job.”

In this there is little that Zinke said that is inconsistent with his earlier statements.  The BIA is too bureaucratic.  He wants to allow tribes to develop their energy resources.  He understands sovereignty, self-determination, and self-government, at least to the extent that federal authorities allow tribes the right to exercise these powers.  To clarify further, in a letter dated May 5 from the “Delegated Authority of the Deputy Secretary” at Interior to Jacqueline Pata, the head of the National Congress of American Indians, James Cason wrote that he was “disturbed by media mischaracterization” of Secretary Ryan Zinke’s comments, and that Zinke “supports tribal self-determination, self-governance, and sovereignty, and believes the Federal Government should meet its trust responsibilities.”

It was a decent attempt to clarify Zinke’s comments.  That this sort of miscommunication, however, can stir up fears of a dark time in American Indian policy, suggests that Zinke and the eventual undersecretary at Interior for Indian Affairs, should President Trump find the time to appoint one, will need to be very careful about what they say, and understand that their actions are being watched very closely and critically by native peoples.